The first thing we must do is distinguish the scapegoat of Leviticus, and a coinage of William Tyndale, from the scapegoat of popular usage. Girard has something to say of the former, of course, but his focus is on the latter. He spends a good bit of time defending his approach against those academic skeptics who are not willing to see the mechanism of persecution in mythology texts in the same way they do see it in historical persecution texts. I take Girard’s defense at this point as unanswerable, and, since it is not at the center of our concern, we don’t need to spend any time on it.
So, what is the scapegoat? As Girard sees it, the scapegoat is someone who, at the climax of a great societal crisis, is blamed for the crisis, and “in archaic societies, credited with the peace and harmony that are restored once the lynching has taken place” (Reader, p. 97). He, by his great sin, threw the whole society into turmoil, and, when he is sacrificed or exiled, he is the one who restores the harmony. He gets both the blame and the credit, although one or the other must obviously be (for the sake of avoiding flagrant contradiction) minimized. In mythology texts, the blame is minimized, and the deification of the hero emphasizes the deliverance he accomplished (from the crisis he himself caused, but we don’t talk about that much anymore).
With regard to historical persecution texts (medieval accusations against the Jews for causing the plague, for example), Girard points out that “naïve persecutors are unaware of what they are doing. Their conscience is too good to deceive their readers systematically, and they present things as they see them” (Reader, p. 104). There is therefore a great deal of free information in those accounts for the scholar who will simply look for it. “Just apply this to the mythology texts,” Girard urges.
So then, what is the “grammar” of persecution? How does it work?
First is the crisis, which may have an external cause (military disaster, plague, floods) or an internal cause (political uproar, religious conflict). But it is important to note that the crisis proper is a loss of that differentiation which is essential to social order. The causes of the various crises may and do vary (the trauma which strikes the blow) as opposed to the crisis itself (the shock the body politic experiences afterwards, which is this loss of differentiation).
“Institutional collapse obliterates or telescopes hierarchical and functional differences, so that everything has the same monotonous and monstrous aspect” (Reader, p. 108).
“Since cultural eclipse is above all a social crisis, there is a strong tendency to explain it by social and, especially, moral causes” (Reader, p. 109).
The second stage is that accusations are made against a victim or victims who are alleged to be the cause of “all this.” The accusations usually fall into three categories: the first is that the victims unforgivably violated or attacked those whom it is most criminal to attack. In ancient societies, this would be figures of authority. In societies affected by the gospel, the accusations are more likely to be of child abuse. Ask yourself: what accusations are most likely to make everyone absolutely forget the rules of evidence? Every society has such categories: ours would be child or spousal abuse.
The second would be sexual crimes, of violations against taboos concerning incest, rape or bestiality, and the grosser the violation, the better the accusation.
The third kind of accusation would be religious crimes—profanation of the host in conservative Catholic countries, desecration of the Bible in Protestant ones, and mockery of egalitarianism in ours.
And last, the victims are “marked” or identified by something easy to see, and which sets them out as differing from everyone else in a disruptive way. The problem is not the difference itself (remember, the society is trying to recover from the traumatic loss of difference). The society needed difference, and, according to the accusations, the victims abused this vulnerability.
C.S. Lewis notes somewhere that we pride ourselves on our great moral superiority because we no longer burn witches. But, he notes, this is not a moral advance because we decline to do so because we no longer believe in witches. We do execute spies, traitors, and serial murderers. If we believed that there were certain members of the community who had the malevolent power to harm and kill their neighbors by supernatural means, what would we do about it? And the chances are good that we would admit “spectral evidence” also—because we admit other forms of spectral evidence today.
A second concern is this: If we extend this principal too far, reading it into absolutely everything, what happens? We have simply come up with a new and unique way to hammer the victim. If all are victims, we are all persecutors. And if in the name of Girard, we get to the point where we refuse to take sides (as God does not refuse to take sides), then we have simply come up with a new way of annihilating differences (in this case moral). But right and wrong have to have some kind of objective meaning.
A few test cases: take the story of Esther. Is this a classic persecution text, in which the Jews are rationalizing and justifying themselves for slaughtering their enemies? Or is it an honorable story of legitimate self-defense? When Jonah was thrown overboard by the sailors, were they scapegoating him, or did God actually require them to do this? When Achan was blamed for the loss at the first battle of Ai, was this an instance of ungodly scapegoating?
Put another way, we have to refuse to allow questions of guilt and innocence to be swallowed up by this sociological theory of the scapegoat. At the same time, we have to anchor our understanding of guilt and innocence in what the Scriptures give us concerning the rules of evidence. What are we allowed to look at, and what must we refuse to consider? One of the central things we must refuse to consider the stampede of the turba, the incipient lynch mob.